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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 18. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

NetApp recently presented at Storage Field Day 18. You can see their videos from Storage Field Day 18 here, and download a PDF copy of my rough notes from here.

Bye, Dave

We were lucky enough to have Dave Hitz (now “Founder Emeritus” at NetApp) spend time with us on his last day in the office. I’ve only met him a few times but I’ve always enjoyed listening to his perspectives on what’s happening in the industry.

Cloud First?

In a previous life I worked in a government department architecting storage and virtualisation solutions for a variety of infrastructure scenarios. The idea, generally speaking, was that those solutions would solve particular business problems, or at least help to improve the processes to resolve those problems. At some point, probably late 2008 or early 2009, we started to talk about developing a “Cloud First” architecture policy, with the idea being that we would resolve to adopt cloud technologies where we could, and reduce our reliance on on-premises solutions as time passed. The beauty of working in enterprise environments is that things can take an awfully long time to happen, so that policy didn’t really come into effect until some years later.

So what does cloud first really mean? It’s possibly not as straightforward as having a “virtualisation first” policy. With the virtualisation first approach, there was a simple qualification process we undertook to determine whether a particular workload was suited to run on our virtualisation platform. This involved all the standard stuff, like funding requirements, security constraints, anticipated performance needs, and licensing concerns. We then pushed the workload one of two ways. With cloud though, there are a few more ways you can skin the cat, and it’s becoming more obvious to me that cloud means different things to different people. Some people want to push workloads to the cloud because they have a requirement to reduce their capital expenditure. Some people have to move to cloud because the CIO has determined that there needs to be a reduction in the workforce managing infrastructure activities. Some people go to cloud because they saw a cool demo at a technology conference. Some people go to cloud because their peers in another government department told them it would be easy to do. The common thread is that “people’s paths to the cloud can be so different”.

Can your workload even run in the cloud? Hitz gave us a great example of some stuff that just can’t (a printing press). The printing press needs to pump out jobs at a certain time of the day every day. It’s not going to necessarily benefit from elastic scalability for its compute workload. The workloads driving the presses would likely run a static workload.

Should it run in the cloud?

It’s a good question to ask. Most of the time, I’d say the answer is yes. This isn’t just because I work for a telco selling cloud products. There are a tonne of benefits to be had in running various, generic workloads in the cloud. Hitz suggests though, that the should it question is a corporate strategy question, and I think he’s spot on. When you embed “cloud first” in your infrastructure architecture, you’re potentially impacting a bunch of stuff outside of infrastructure architecture, including financial models, workforce management, and corporate security postures. It diens’t have to be a big deal, but it’s something that people sometimes don’t think about. And just because you start with that as your mantra, doesn’t mean you need to end up in cloud.

Does It Feel Cloudy?

Cloudy? It’s my opinion that NetApp’s cloud story is underrated. But, as Hitz noted, they’ve had the occasional misstep. When they first introduced Cloud ONTAP, Anthony Lye said it “didn’t smell like cloud”. Instead, Hitz told us he said it “feels like a product for storage administrators”. Cloudy people don’t want that, and they don’t want to talk to storage administrators. Some cloudy people were formerly storage folks, and some have never had the misfortune of managing over-provisioned midrange arrays at scale. Cloud comes in all different flavours, but it’s clear that just shoving a traditional on-premises product on a public cloud provider’s infrastructure isn’t really as cloudy as we’d like to think.

Bridging The Gap

NetApp are focused now on “finding the space between the old and the new, and understanding that you’ll have both for a long time”. And that’s what NetApp’s focusing on moving forward. They’re not just working on cloud-only solutions, and they have no plans to ditch their on-premises. Indeed, as Hitz noted in his presentation, “having good cloudy solutions will help them gain share in on-premises footprint”. It’s a good strategy, as the on-premises market will be around for some time to come (do you like how vague that is?). It’s been my belief for some time that companies, like NetApp, that can participate in both the on-premises and cloud market effectively will be successful.

Perhaps I spent the time focusing on the “cloud first” conversation because it was Dave Hitz, and it’s likely the last time I’ll see him presenting in this kind of forum. But whether it was Dave or not, conversations like this one are important, in my opinion. It often feels like we’re putting the technology ahead of the why. I’m a big fan of cloud first, but I’m an even bigger fan of people understanding the impact that their technology decisions can have on the business they’re working for. It’s nice to see a vendor who can comfortably operate on both sides of the equation having this kind of conversation, and I think it’s one that more businesses need to be having with their vendors and their internal staff.

So what is NetApp ONTAP AI? It’s a “proven” architecture delivered via NetApp’s channel partners. It’s comprised of compute, storage and networking. Storage is delivered over NFS. The idea is that you can start small and scale out as required.

I’ve written about NetApp’s Edge to Core to Cloud story before, and this offering certainly builds on the work they’ve done with big data and machine learning solutions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions are like big data from five years ago, or public cloud. You can’t go to any industry event, or take a briefing from an infrastructure vendor, without hearing all about how they’re delivering solutions focused on AI. What you do with the gear once you’ve bought one of these spectacularly ugly boxes is up to you, obviously, and I don’t want to get in to whether some of these solutions are really “AI” or not (hint: they’re usually not). While the vendors are gushing breathlessly about how AI will conquer the world, if you tone down the hyperbole a bit, there’re still some fascinating problems being solved with these kinds of solutions.

I don’t think that every business, right now, will benefit from an AI strategy. As much as the vendors would like to have you buy one of everything, these kinds of solutions are very good at doing particular tasks, most of which are probably not in your core remit. That’s not to say that you won’t benefit in the very near future from some of the research and development being done in this area. And it’s for this reason that I think architectures like this one, and those from NetApp’s competitors, are contributing something significant to the ongoing advancement of these fields.

I also like that this is delivered via channel partners. It indicates, at least at first glance, that AI-focused solutions aren’t simply something you can slap a SKU on and sells 100s of. Partners generally have a better breadth of experience across the various hardware, software and services elements and their respective constraints, and will often be in a better position to spend time understanding the problem at hand rather than treating everything as the same problem with one solution. There’s also less chance that the partner’s sales people will have performance accelerators tied to selling one particular line of products. This can be useful when trying to solve problems that are spread across multiple disciplines and business units.

The folks at NVIDIA have made a lot of noise in the AI / ML marketplace lately, and with good reason. They know how to put together blazingly fast systems. I’ll be interested to see how this architecture goes in the marketplace, and whether customers are primarily from the NetApp side of the fence, from the NVIDIA side, or perhaps both. You can grab a copy of the solution brief here, and there’s an AI white paper you can download from here. The real meat and potatoes though, is the reference architecture document itself, which you can find here.

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 15. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

NetApp recently presented at Storage Field Day 15. You can see videos of their presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

The primary considerations of these solutions were usually cost and agility. The focus was to:

Limit up front costs and get the system operational quickly; and

Scalability, availability, and governance were afterthoughts

A typical approach to this was to use cloud or commodity infrastructure. This ended up becoming the final architecture. The problem with this approach, according to NetApp, is that it lead to unpredictable behaviour as copies manifested. You’d end up with 3-5 replicas of data copied across lines of business and various functions. Not a great situation.

Early Generation Analytics Platform Challenges

Other challenges with this architecture included:

Unpredictable performance;

Inefficient storage utilisation;

Media and node failures;

Total cost of ownership;

Not enterprise ready; and

Storage and compute tied (creating imbalance).

Next Generation Data Pipeline

So what do we really need from a data pipeline? According to NetApp, the key is “Unified Insights across LoBs and Functions”. By this they mean:

A unified enterprise data lake;

Federated data sources across the 2nd and 3rd platforms;

In-place access to the data pipeline (copy avoidance);

Spanned across edge, core and cloud; and

Future proofed to allow shifts in architecture.

Another key consideration is the deployment. The first proof of concept is performed by the business unit, but it needs to scale for production use.

Scale edge, core and cloud as a single pipeline

Predictable availability

Governance, data protection, security on data pipeline

This provides for a lower TCO over the life of the solution.

Data Pipeline Requirements

We’re not just playing in the core any more, or exclusively in the cloud. This stuff is everywhere. And everywhere you look the requirements differ as well.

Edge

Massive data (few TB/device/day)

Real-time Edge Analytics / AI

Ultra Low Latency

Network Bandwidth

Smart Data Movement

Core

Ultra high IO bandwidth (20 – 200+ GBps)

Ultra-low latency (micro – nanosecond)

Linear scale (1 – 128 node AI)

Overall TCO for 1-100+ PB

Cloud

Cloud analytics, AI/DL/ML

Consume and not operate

Cloud vendor vs on-premises stack

Cost-effective archive

Need to avoid cloud lock-in

Here’s picture of what the data pipeline looks like for NetApp.

[Image courtesy of NetApp]

NetApp provided the following overview of what the data pipeline looks like for AI / Deep Learning environments. You can read more about that here.

[Image courtesy of NetApp]

What Does It All Mean?

NetApp have a lot of tools at their disposal, and a comprehensive vision for meeting the requirements of big data, AI and deep learning workloads from a number of different angles. It’s not just about performance, it’s about understanding where the data needs to be to be considered useful to the business. I think there’s a good story to tell here with NetApp’s Data Fabric, but it felt a little like there remains some integration work to do. Big data, AI and deep learning means different things to different people, and there’s sometimes a reluctance to change the way people do things for the sake of adopting a new product. NetApp’s biggest challenge will be demonstrating the additional value they bring to the table, and the other ways in which they can help enterprise succeed.

NetApp, like some of the other Tier 1 storage vendors, has a broad portfolio of products at its disposal. The Data Fabric play is a big bet on being able to tie this all together in a way that their competitors haven’t managed to do yet. Ultimately, the success of this strategy will rely on NetApp’s ability to listen to customers and continue to meet their needs. As a few companies have found out the hard way, it doesn’t matter how cool you think your idea is, or how technically innovative it is, if you’re not delivering results for the business you’re going to struggle to gain traction in the market. At this stage I think NetApp are in a good place, and hopefully they can stay there by continuing to listen to their existing (and potentially new) customers.

For an alternative perspective, I recommend reading Chin-Fah’s thoughts from Storage Field Day 15 here.

NetApp recently announced the 2018 list of NetApp United members and I’m happy to see I’m on the list. If you’re not familiar with the NetApp United program, it’s “NetApp’s global influencer program. Founded in 2017, NetApp United is a community of 140+ individuals united by their passion for great technology and the desire to share their expertise with the world”. One of the nice things about it is the focus on inclusiveness, community and knowledge sharing. I’m doing a lot more with NetApp than I have in the past and I’m really looking forward to the year ahead from both the NetApp United perspective and the broader NetApp view. You can read the announcement here and view the list of members. Chan also did a nice little write-up you can read here. And while United isn’t a football team, I will leave you with this great quote from the inimitable Eric Cantona – “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea“.

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

You can view the video of NetApp‘s presentation here, and download a copy of my rough notes from here.

What’s In A Name?

There’s been some amount of debate about whether NetApp’s HCI offering is really HCI or CI. I’m not going to pick sides in this argument. I appreciate that words mean things and definitions are important, but I’d like to focus more on what NetApp’s offering delivers, rather than whether someone in Tech Marketing made the right decision to call this HCI. Let’s just say they’re closer to HCI than WD is to cloud.

Ye Olde Architectures (The HCI Tax)

NetApp spent some time talking about the “HCI Tax” – the overhead of providing various data services with first generation HCI appliances. Gabe touched on the impact of running various iterations of controller VMs, along with the increased memory requirements for services such as deduplication, erasure coding, compression, and encryption. The model for first generation HCI is simple – grow your storage and compute in lockstep as your performance requirements increase. The great thing with this approach is that you can start small and grow your environment as required. The problem with this approach is that you may only need to grow your storage, or you may only need to grow your compute requirement, but not necessarily both. Granted, a number of HCI vendors now offer storage-only nodes to accommodate this requirement, but NetApp don’t think the approach is as polished as it could be. The requirement to add compute as you add storage can also have a financial impact in terms of the money you’ll spend in licensing for CPUs. Whilst one size fits all has its benefits for linear workloads, this approach still has some problems.

The New Style?

NetApp suggest that their solution offers the ability to “scale on your terms”. With this you can

Optimise and protect existing investments;

Scale storage and compute together or independently; and

Eliminate the “HCI Tax”.

Note that only the storage nodes have disks, the compute nodes get blanks. The disks are on the front of the unit and the nodes are stateless. You can’t have different tiers of storage nodes as it’s all one cluster. It’s also BYO switch for connectivity, supporting 10/25Gbps. In terms of scalability, from a storage perspective you can scale as much as SolidFire can nowadays (around 100 nodes), and your compute nodes are limited by vSphere’s maximum configuration.

There are “T-shirt sizes” for implementation, and you can start small with as little as two blocks (2 compute nodes and 4 storage nodes). I don’t believe you mix t-shirt sizes in the same cluster. Makes sense if you think about it for more than a second.

Thoughts

Converged and hyper-converged are different things, and I think this post from Nick Howell (in the context of Cohesity as HCI) sums up the differences nicely. However, what was interesting for me during this presentation wasn’t whether or not this qualifies as HCI or not. Rather, it was about NetApp building on the strengths of SolidFire’s storage offering (guaranteed performance with QoS and good scale) coupled with storage / compute independence to provide customers with a solution that seems to tick a lot of boxes for the discerning punter.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll know that NetApp are quite a different beast to the company first founded 25 years ago. The great thing about them (and the other major vendors) entering the already crowded HCI market is that they offer choices that extend beyond the HCI play. For the next few years at least, there are going to be workloads that just may not go so well with HCI. If you’re already a fan of NetApp, chances are they’ll have an alternative solution that will allow you to leverage their capability and still get the outcome you need. Gabe made the excellent point that “[y]ou can’t go from traditional to cloud overnight, you need to evaluate your apps to see where they fit”. This is exactly the same with HCI. I’m looking forward to see how they go against the more established HCI vendors in the marketplace, and whether the market responds positively to some of the approaches they’ve taken with the solution.

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 13. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day and Pure Storage. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

I had the good fortune of seeing Andy Banta present at Storage Field Day 13. He spoke about a number of topics, including the death of the specialised admin, and VMware Virtual Volumes integration with SoldFire. You can find a copy of my rough notes from NetApp’s presentation here. You can also find videos from his presentation here.

Changing Times

People have been thinking about the changing role of the specialised IT admin for a while now. The discussion has been traditionally focused on the server administrator’s place in a cloudy world, but the storage administrator’s role is coming under scrutiny in much the same fashion. The reasons for the changing landscape are mostly identical to those that impacted the server administrator’s role:

Architectures are becoming easier to manage

Tools are designed for rapid deployment, not constantly adjusting

The hardware is becoming commoditised

Software is defining the features and the admin duties

Storage requirements are more dynamic than before, with transient workloads being seen as more commonplace than the static loads once prevalent in the enterprise. The pace of change is also increasing.

According to NetApp, the key focus areas for operational staff have changed as expectations have evolved.

Traditional IT has focused on things being “Available and Reliable”

The virtualisation age gave us the opportunity to do more with less

The cloud age is causing things to happen faster; and

As-a-Service is driving the application evolution.

These new focus areas bring with them a new set of challenges though. As we move from the “legacy” DC to the new now, there are other things we have to consider.

Legacy Data Centre

Next Generation Data Centre

Single Tenant

Multi-tenant

Isolated Workloads

Mixed Workloads

Dedicated Infrastructure

Shared Infrastructure

Scale Up

Scale Out

Pre-provisioned Capacity

Capacity on Demand

Hardware Defined

Software Defined

Project Based

Self Service

Manual Administration

Automation

In case you hadn’t realised it, we’re in a bit of a bad way in a lot of enterprises when it comes to IT operations. NetApp neatly identified what’s going wrong in terms of both business and operational limitations.

Business Limitations

Unpredictable application performance

Show response to changing business needs

Under utilisation of expensive resources

Operational Limitations

Storage policies tied to static capabilities

All virtual disks treated the same

Minimal visibility and control on array

Very hands on

The idea is to embrace the “New Evolution” which will improve the situation from both a business and operational perspective.

Business Benefits

Guarantee per-application performance

Immediately respond to changing needs

Scale to match utilisation requirements

Operational benefits

Dynamically match storage to application

Align virtual disk performance to workload

Fully automate control of storage resources

No One is Exempt

Operations is hard. No one misses being focused on server administration. With virtualisation administration there is higher value that can be had. NetApp argue that there are higher value activities that exist for the storage discipline as well. Andy summed it up nicely when he said that “[e]nabling through integrations is the goal”.

People like tuning in to events like Storage Field Day because the presenters and delegates often get deep into the technology to highlight exactly how widget X works and why product Y is super terrific. But there’s a lot of value to be had in understanding the context within which these products exist too. We run technology to serve applications that help businesses do business things. It doesn’t matter how fast the latest NVMe/F product is if the application it dishes up is platformed on Windows 2003 and SQL 2005. Sometimes it’s nice to talk about things that aren’t directly focused on technology to understand why a lot of us are actually here.

Ultimately, the cloud (in its many incantations) is having a big impact on the day job of a lot of people, as are rapid developments in key cloud technologies, such as storage, compute, virtualisation and software defined everything. It’s not only operations staff, but also architects, sales people, coffee shop owners, and all kinds of IT folks within the organisation that are coming to grips with the changing IT landscape. I don’t necessarily buy into the “everything is DevOps now and you should learn to code or die” argument, but I also don’t think the way we did things 10 years ago is not necessarily sustainable anywhere but in the largest and crustiest of enterprise IT shops.

NetApp have positioned this viewpoint because they want us to think that what they’re selling is going to help us transition from rock breakers to automation rock stars. And they’re not the first to think that they can help make it happen. Plenty of companies have come along and told us (for years it seems) that they can improve our lot and make all of our problems go away with some smart automation and a good dose of common sense. Unfortunately, people are still running businesses, and people are still making decisions on how technology is being deployed in the businesses. Which is a shame, because I’d much rather let scripts handle the bulk of the operational work and get on with cool stuff like optimising workloads to run faster and smarter and give more value back to the business. I’m also not saying that what NetApp is selling doesn’t work as they say it will. I’m just throwing in the people element as a potential stumbling block.

Is the role of the specialised storage administrator dead? I think it may be a little premature to declare it dead at this stage. But if you’re spending all of your time carving out LUNs by hand and manually zoning fabrics you should be considering the next step in your evolution. You’re not exempt. You’re not doing things that are necessarily special or unique. A lot of this stuff can be automated. And should be. This stuff is science, not wizardry. Let a program do the heavy lifting. You can focus on providing the right inputs. I’m not by any stretch saying that this is an easy transition. Nor do I think that a lot of people have the answers when confronted with this kind of change. But I think it is coming. While vendors like NetApp have been promising to make administration and management of their products easy for years, it feels like we’re a lot closer to that operational nirvana than we were a few years ago. Which I’m really pretty happy about, and you should be too. So don’t be special, at least not in an operational way.

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 12. My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are some notes from NetApp‘s presentation at Storage Field Day 12. You can view the video here and download my rough notes here. I made a joke during the presentation about Dave Hitz being lucky enough to sit next to me, but he’s the smart guy in this equation.

While I’ve not had an awful lot to do with NetApp previously, it’s not often I get to meet guys like Dave in real life. As such I found the NetApp presentation to be a tremendous experience. But enough about stars in my eyes. Arthur Lent spent some time covering off two technologies that I found intriguing: SnapCenter and Cloud Control for Microsoft Office 365.

[image courtesy of Tech Field Day]

SnapCenter Overview

SnapCenter is a key part of NetApp’s data protection strategy. You can read about this here. Here’s an overview on what was delivered with version 1.0.

End-to-end Data Protection

Simple, scalable, single interfaces to protect enterprise data (physical and virtualised) across the data fabric;

Meets SLAs easily by leveraging NTAP technologies;

Replaces traditional tape infrastructure with backup to the cloud; and

Extensible using user-created custom plug-ins.

Efficient In-place Copy Data Management

Leverages your existing NTAP storage infrastructure;

Provides visibility of copies across the data fabric; and

Enables reuse of copies for test/dev, DR, and analytics.

Accelerated application development

Transforms traditional IT to be more agile

Empowers application and database admins to self-serve

Enables DevOps and data lifecycle management for faster time to market

Sounds pretty good? There’s more though …

New with SnapCenter Version 2.0

End-to-end data protection for NAS file services from flash to disk to cloud (public or private);

Flexible, cost-effective tape replacement solution;

Integrated file catalog for simplified file search and recovery across the hybrid cloud; and

SnapCenter custom plug-ins enable the creation and use of custom plugins. There are two community plug-ins available at release. Why use plugins?

Some mission critical applications or DBs are difficult to backup;

Custom plugins offer a way to consistently backup almost anything;

Write the plugin once and distribute it to multiple hosts through SnapCenter;

Get all the SnapCenter benefits; and

A plugin only has the capabilities written into it.

Cloud Control for Microsoft Office 365

NetApp advised that this product would be “Available Soon”. I don’t know when that is, but you can read more about it here. NetApp says it offers a “[h]ighly scalable, multi-tenant SaaS offering for data protection, security, and compliance”. In short, it:

Retain control of sensitive data as you move users, folders, mailboxes to O365;

Enable business continuity with fault-tolerant data protection;

Store data securely on NetApp at non-MS locations; and

Meet regulatory compliance with cloud-ready services.

Conclusion and Further Reading

In my opinion, the improvements in SnapCenter 2.0 demonstrate NetApp’s focus on improving some key elements of the offering, with the ability to use custom plugins being an awesome feature. I’m even more excited by Cloud Control for Office 365, simply because I’ve lost count of the number of enterprises that have shoved their email services up there (“low-hanging fruit” for cloud migration) and haven’t even considered how the hell they’re going to protect or retain the data in a useful way (“Doesn’t Microsoft do that for me?”). The amount of times people have simply overlooked some of the regulatory requirements on corporate email services is troubling, to say the least. If you’re an existing or potential NetApp customer this kind of product is something you should be investigating post haste.

Of course, I’ve barely begun to skim the surface of NetApp’s Data Fabric offering. As a relative newcomer, I’m looking forward to diving into this further in the near future. If you’re thinking of doing the same, I recommend you check out this white paper on NetApp Data Fabric Architecture Fundamentals for a great overview of what NetApp are doing in this space.

Disclaimer: I don’t work for Stormons, and I’ve not been compensated for this post. I just think it’s a cool product that is worth checking out.

Didier from Stormons recently got in touch to let me know there’s now a Professional version of the software available now as part of a subscription deal. I’ve previously covered Stormons here and here and think it’s pretty good stuff – and definitely worth checking out – particularly if you have a large environment to work with. Apparently EMC in Bangalore are heavy users of the product as well. The Professional Edition is offered on a subscription basis, and they’re running a discounted rate until May to celebrate the release. Find out more about it here. You can also still access the free edition from the downloads page.

I covered the release of Stormons 1.3.2 GAhere and mentioned a few of the highlights of the new version. In between doing some vCD stuff and the general faffing about that seems to happen at this time of year, I’ve had a chance to install it on my lab PC and monitor our two CX4-120s. I’m not going to regurgitate the installation manual (which can be downloaded from here). I thought it might be more useful if I covered off the bits that weren’t obvious to me when I first installed the product. Note that if you’re used to deploying web apps and familiar with Apache configuration files, you won’t have as much of an issue with getting this working as I did. As it happens, I’m more idiot than savant when it comes to these things so it took me a little longer than it should have to get going.

Windows Server 2003 is listed as the supported OS. I used 32-bit Windows 7, as that was the OS on my laptop at the time. I used Apache 2.2 as the web server. There’s a bunch of supported models listed in the installation guide, but I’ve only used this product with EMC CLARiiON CX4 arrays. I can’t speak for its usefulness with NetApp FAS, EMC Symmetrix, EMC Celerra or Brocade FC devices.

I copied the extracted (and renamed) installation files to C:\tools\ and set the System Variable accordingly. Here’re the changes I made to my httpd.conf file to get things working. If I’ve done things really badly, feel free to chime in.

The first bit is to add a Directory for the location of the SM1.3 installation.

And that was it from the Apache side of things. After that I ran through the Stormons configuration as per the installation guide, setting paths to various binaries, etc. Note that if you’ve just copied RRDtool from the internet it’s worth running it first. I was missing the msvcr100.dll and it was crapping out without my knowledge (re-installing the Visual Studio 2008 redistributable fixed that). When you’re installing the Stormons polling service, make sure that you’re running a command prompt with sufficient privileges to install services, or you won’t get any useful results. I’m still having problems with RRDtool drawing pictures, but I’m working on that.

I’m hoping to do a more thorough run-through on some of the stuff you can do with Stormons in the next week or two.

Didier from Stormons recently got in contact (I knew a degree in French would eventually come in handy for something) to let me know that Stormons 1.3.2 GA has now been released. I’ve been meaning to give this tool a run in the lab for a while now, and I’m hopeful that I can do something in the next few weeks when work gets a bit quieter. You can download pre-compiled Windows (32 and 64-bit) binaries or Linux source code here. I won’t go into all of the features now, but here’re a few highlights:

In terms of the code, it is comprised of 43000 lines of Perl 5.14, 70 HTML reports, a multi-threaded engine and a scheduler.

Some reports offer the ability to compare configurations between two dates (helpful for trending and capacity planning).

Detailed alerts can be created.

“Storage Classes” can be created and used as a basis for Chargeback reports.

There’s a bunch of other features, including support for Brocade fabric traffic monitoring and some Nagios integration. And, as mentioned previously, there’s 70 HTML reports covering RAID Groups, CX Storage Pools, MirrorView, NetApp Volumes, Celerra LUNs, and so on. The program has been written for storage admins by a storage admin. I’m looking forward to testing it out on our CX4s, and Mat might even have a little less work to do as a result.

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disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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